


Haven't Met You Yet

by mydogwatson



Series: WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS [29]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre-slash. Pre everything really.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 18:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mydogwatson/pseuds/mydogwatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's just wait and see what happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haven't Met You Yet

**Author's Note:**

> An author, like a mother, should probably not have favorites. But if I had to choose one sort of fav from this series. I think this one would be it. It is a story I have wanted to tell for a while, but until this series and, in particular, this song, didn't quite have a handle on it. Hope you think I found it.

I might have to wait; I’ll never give up.  
I guess it’s half timing and the other  
half’s luck. Wherever you are,  
whenever it’s right, you’ll come  
out of nowhere and into my life.  
I just haven’t met you yet.  
-Michael Buble

1.

 

I arose early.

Well, I say ‘arose.’ What I actually did was push my body up from the kitchen counter where it had apparently slumped of its own accord several hours earlier. That fact was extraordinarily irritating, as I had been comparing various soil samples from a garden [a poison garden!] in an attempt to exonerate the accused, a possibly homicidal chef.

Or to convict him. Whatever. It never matters to me at all which result is the outcome. I work only to solve the mystery, not deliver justice. And now I would have to begin the experiment all over again.

Sometimes life is nothing more than one annoyance after the other.

It is my hope to one day have complete control over the weaknesses of the flesh. Already, of course, I am better at that than 98% of the population. The number is not 100% only because I dislike an absolute without definitive evidence.

As I stood and stretched to ease the stiffness in my spine, said stiffness reminding me that my twenties were a dim memory, my gaze surveyed the grim surroundings that would soon no longer be my home.

Someone should do a study into the unreasonableness of London landlords, who seem to take umbrage at the slightest deviation from the norm. In this particular instance, the final straw seems to have been what was really a very minor explosion. Scarcely any damage at all.

And I had, of course, solved the case, which fact surprisingly did not mollify the owner of the building as much as it should have. Or at all really.

Brilliance does not receive nearly the respect that it should.

It is a terrible inconvenience having to deal with the minutia of life. But one has to live somewhere. It seems unlikely, even given her slavish [and extremely irritating] devotion to me, that Hooper would let me set up a home in a corner of the morgue at Barts. Even if she did, I shudder to think of what the cost would be to me.

Not in money, of course, but in what she would expect from me in return.

I sighed and headed for the bathroom. Places to go, people to see.

Hot shower, shampoo, teeth cleaning. As always, I pretend some irritation with the unruly curls on my head. The truth is, although there is no vanity in my nature, I am fond of my hair.

A bit of sentimentality, no doubt, as my mother was also fond of the curls. [Her first son was a disappointment in that regard. And many others.] She used to run her fingers through my hair when I became agitated and the action had been surprisingly effective at calming me.

Now I performed the ritual for myself, which is not quite so…efficient, but needs must.

Also, it is not vanity to realise that on many occasions my appearance serves me well. So I donned a black Gucci suit and a deep midnight blue silk shirt, but no tie. Then I tousled my curls artfully.

Finished and ready for the day, I studied myself in the mirror.

“Well done, Sherlock,” I said.

Everybody likes to be complimented occasionally.

2.

Day fifty-seven.

Some mornings I feel as if I should scratch a mark on the wall to strike off the day, as prisoners do. Or as films say they do. I doubt it. The time I was a prisoner counting the days on the mud wall of the hut never occurred to me. Too fucking busy staying alive.

[And if there are days when I wonder why I bothered, those days are best not thought of.]  
Anyway. This is the fifty-seventh day that I am waking up in this room. Temporary military housing. I will have to be out very soon, but so far there is no place I have found to go.

There is really no decent place in London I can afford on my army pension.

Maybe I’ll just sit here until they come to bodily toss me out onto the pavement. That would make a good headline. GIMPY EX-SOLDIER EVICTED. Yeah, that would work. Throw in a few lines about my medals and the public would weep.

Only thing is, I not sure I really want to be an object of pity for millions in the nation’s capital city.

So on morning fifty-seven, I dress in my one and only suit because I have a job interview. Not the first I’ve had and I am sure that nothing will come of this one either. Truthfully, I don’t even really want it to come to anything. A dull job in a dull clinic. 

I’m a freaking surgeon.

Or I was. But very few patients want a bloke with intermittent tremors cutting into their flesh and I don’t blame them at all.

So I dress in my suit and comb my hair and arrange my face into a peaceful civilian mode.

John Watson has apparently decided to survive one more day.

Whether anybody else cares or not.

3.

One needs tea, of course.

Unfortunately, yet again, there was no milk tucked in-between the body parts stored in my refrigerator.

There really should be some sort of arrangement one could enter into that would assure that things like fresh milk and clean laundry simply appeared when necessary. Until the time that happy day comes to pass, sadly, I will have to go out for my lapsang souchong.

The café on the corner was crowded, of course, with the usual collection of idiots and they all seemed to be talking. Not one, as far as I could tell had anything of interest to say. The pimple-faced server behind the counter glared at me as usual. I had been briefly bewildered by his instant hostility until I realised that he has an uncle at Scotland Yard. Which fact explained his whispered, “Here’s your tea, freak” whenever I come in. One morning I might tell him that his uncle’s usual job was making tea for the inspector and he was barely trusted to do even that.

I managed to make my way to a small table in the corner and tucked myself in, although my knees and elbows protruded dangerously. I was suddenly reminded of the lunchroom at school. Fortunately, no one here threw a bread roll at my head.

Two women at the table nearest mine were blathering on about a date one of them had gone on the night before. Apparently the male in question had not lived up to expectations. In my humble opinion, with her shiny red lips and too-tight blouse, she should have been extremely grateful to find anyone at all to put up with her.

Because I had an appointment and didn’t want to be late, I passed on the opportunity to be helpful. Sometimes that didn’t work out as well as might be hoped for and I had no time for a melee this morning.

Instead, I simply finished my tea and left the café to wave down a cab, heading for Shoreditch in order to wrap up a case of fraud at a small private bank.

That was quickly handled, so I moved on to a couple of other cases. There was still the matter of the green ladder to deal with, but because several officers involved in that investigation had been particularly annoying [I mean, if they want to insult me, they could at least put some effort into it and not rely on the same old name-calling], I decided that could wait until tomorrow. Let them bumble a little longer. 

I must take my pleasures where I can.

 

4.

The job interview went exactly as I had known it would. Just sitting in the very beige waiting room until the office manager was free bored me so much that by the time the interview actually began my limp was on full display. And my damned hand was shaking.

Unsurprisingly, the man was not impressed.

Of course, the last time anyone was impressed by me I had taken out a sniper with a single shot from a record-setting distance. Sadly that kind of ability will probably be of limited usefulness in my civilian life. Limited as in no use at all.

All in all, I was able to limp out of the clinic in only about thirty minutes. Last time it took me nearly an hour to be rejected, so I’m getting better at this.

Sadly there are no more interviews scheduled that would allow me to keep perfecting my skills at not being hired.

 

5.

Sometimes I marvel that any crimes at all get solved in London [other than the ones I work on, of course.] I dropped in on Lestrade, who wouldn’t tell me anything about the suicides, but wanted instead to bore me with an ordinary domestic murder. It took me seven minutes to give him the name of the husband’s mistress who had obviously poisoned the wife.

I despair.

Sally dropped in to glare at me and mutter under her breath. Good lord, I really ought to gift her with a thesaurus so the litany of insults would at least vary a bit. Repetition is so annoying. Although I am amused by her apparent belief that she is the first to label me a freak.

As I left Lestrade’s office, I checked my texts. I deleted two from my brother without reading them, but opened one from a woman I had not heard from in some time. [An aside: Florida is a dreadful place and I would like to spend the rest of my days never visiting there again.]

Her message was really only an inquiry after my health and current activities but as I quickly skimmed it, an interesting thought came to mind. Mrs. Hudson, I recalled, owned a rather pleasant building on Baker Street with a flat or two she rented out.

With one hand I summoned a cab, while with the other I was texting her that I would be there in a few minutes.

Nothing like a visit to an old acquaintance. Especially one who had a rental flat and an unlikely affection for me.

 

6.

Just to avoid my room for a little longer, I went for an early dinner at a cheap café nearby to have bangers and mash in the company of others with no place better to be.

But, in the end, there was nothing for it except to drag myself back to that cell.

I like a certain amount of routine in my life, which is the fault of the military. They gave me all these habits and then they dumped me.

So, practically by rote, I washed, donned my pajamas, brushed my teeth and had my cup of chamomile, which didn’t really help me sleep, but was habit by now. Then I sat in front of the computer for twenty minutes without writing a word that would make my therapist happy tomorrow.

Finally, I checked to be sure that my gun was clean, loaded and in its usual place.

So. Therapist tomorrow. Then, I decided, a walk in the park. Not that I necessarily wanted to see anything in the park, but any schedule with only one item on it hardly even qualified. I wrote it all down on the calendar.

Visit my therapist.

Take a walk in the park.

A plan. Structure.

My life.

7.

London at night.

I often walk the streets of the city late at night. It makes me feel rather like a king surveying his domain. Fanciful, I know, but as already noted, I take my pleasures where I can. 

Eventually, however, I made my way back to the dreadful flat. At least, my chat with Mrs. Hudson had gone splendidly. True, I did have to listen to a considerable amount of mindless blather about her life since our last meeting. But she quite likes me and is going to give me a very good deal on the flat. I still can’t quite afford it, but will worry about that later. She suggested finding someone to share. Past attempts at that kind of thing have not gone well, but I didn’t tell her that.

I went so far as to give Mycroft a call to see if he would be willing to release some of my funds, but he refused. Apparently my probation period has not yet expired. But I have been a younger brother for a very long time and have the role perfected, so I demanded that at least he should send a van in the morning to carry my things over to Baker Street. Rather surprisingly, he did agree to that.

It was very late by the time I was settled at the counter with the soil samples once again. Molly Hooper had texted me the news that a body had come in that would work nicely for my experiment in bruising on corpses. Excellent news. I will go there in the morning after the van has collected my belongings. I was actually prepared to go immediately, but she insisted that she had to go home to feed her cats and get some sleep and no one else was going to let me use my riding crop on the deceased. The delay was not ideal, but the timeline of the crime in question was undefined anyway, so I would manage. 

It was very quiet by the time I bent over the soil samples to check the results of my tests. Ahh, it seemed that the pompous chef was on his way to prison. His solicitor, who had retained me to clear his client, would not be pleased. Which was not my problem, of course. I had a result.

I straightened.

“Brilliant, Sherlock,” I whispered. “Brilliant.”

fini

**Author's Note:**

> Cannot believe that tomorrow's posting will finish this series.


End file.
